It is a peculiar predicament for Shuffield, who is used to keeping up with both a busy schedule and her beat-up BlackBerry, the one that constantly flashes red. But Shuffield’s calendar has been so full lately that it has been impossible for her to clean out her inbox.

She has just returned from an eight-day jaunt abroad, where the world, it seemed, was trying to get ahold of her and, more important, her boss. Shuffield was in Jordan one minute, at the Western Wall the next. Then on to London. And Paris. Everywhere Sen. John McCain went, there she was, at his side. And everywhere McCain was, there was a mob of reporters with whom Shuffield had to contend.

“I had these nightmare visions of him being mobbed by the press corps,” Shuffield said.

As McCain’s Senate press secretary, Shuffield is responsible for these worst-fear scenarios — and for having a plan to deal with them when they inevitably come to pass.

“If you don’t plan for the press, they plan for themselves,” said Shuffield, sounding more like 49 than the 29 that she is. “And I didn’t want them camped outside the senator’s hotel room at all hours.”

Shuffield’s job has grown increasingly demanding these days as McCain’s every move is examined, dissected and analyzed over and over again by newspapers, blogs and cable news. While Jill Hazelbaker, the McCain campaign’s communications director, handles campaign-related inquiries, Shuffield has become the go-to girl back in Washington because — even in his absence — she knows exactly what her boss would say.

It is a job well-suited to Shuffield, who colleagues say “has the gift of gab” and knows both politics and policy. Yet it is also a job she never expected to have.

Growing up in Miami, Shuffield had more of an affinity for handbags than for politics. After college, she saw herself living someplace glamorous, like Barcelona or Madrid — which is to say, not Washington.

“I knew nothing about politics,” Shuffield said. “My parents weren’t political at all. They paid attention, but it wasn’t something that drove them. We didn’t talk about it at the dinner table or anything.”

After graduating from the University of Florida six years ago with degrees in public relations and Spanish, Shuffield started what she called a “grass-roots campaign” to get a job. She called everyone she knew, friends of friends of friends, and finally ended up working on health care issues and earning a paycheck from Porter Novelli, a PR firm in Washington.

Two years into it, she started dreaming again of Spain.

But that was just a dream. A boss convinced her that she couldn’t leave Washington without giving politics a try.

“I knew she was tailor-made for a place in politics,” said Patrice Geraghty, a senior vice president at Porter Novelli. “She has more excitement, energy, enthusiasm and dedication than anyone with traditional political experience. She just needed someone to believe in her and push her.”

Shuffield latched onto the Senate campaign of fellow Floridian Mel Martinez; she said she was “thrown into the deep end from day one” and ended up working in Martinez’s Washington office after the election.

“She was a great asset and a valuable member of my team,” Martinez said. “She really has great character and brings a lot of skills to the table.”

Kirk Fordham, who worked alongside Shuffield on the Martinez campaign, added: “The thing that makes Melissa so appealing to lawmakers is that she has zero interest in self-promotion, a trait that is becoming all too common in the ranks of the Hill and campaign flacks.”

One day in 2006, when she was least expecting it, she got an e-mail inviting her to apply for a job in McCain’s office. And now, here she is. As McCain traveled the world last month, part senator, part statesman, part guy making one last attempt to be president, Shuffield had the tough job of making sure he was seen, heard and read not just in the news back home but also in hundreds of outlets around the world. Living on cereal bars and adrenaline, Shuffield spent her days making sure most of those news-hungry reporters got face time with a man moving at a dizzying pace.

Not everything went as she had hoped.

Facing a bank of cameras and reporters at a stop in Israel, McCain made a clear gaffe. He said that Iran was harboring and training Al Qaeda militants. Shuffield watched as Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) corrected him, whispering in McCain’s ear that Iran is believed to be harboring Shiite insurgents but not members of the Sunni group Al Qaeda.

“At the time, I didn’t think much about it,” she said. “In my mind, it wasn’t a big deal, but I was trying to gauge the reaction of the crowd. I saw one person grimace.”

It wasn’t until that evening, when Shuffield was about to sit down at a restaurant in Jerusalem, that she moved into damage-control mode. There were dozens and dozens of inquiries on her BlackBerry, and her inbox kept growing. So Shuffield did what any press secretary would do under the circumstances: She skipped dinner.

“I just went outside and answered as many questions as I could,” she said. “Sen. McCain kept saying, ‘Melissa, come sit down and eat.’”

But Shuffield never did. She had to return the dozens of voice mails and e-mails. She had a reputation to protect — hers and his.

Several days later, back in the U.S., Shuffield half-understands: “Hindsight is 20/20,” she said. “It’s political season. The press is gonna pick at everything.”

Still, it was a moment in the eye of a political storm that she could not have imagined just a few years ago.

Now, after two years of working for McCain, she says her boss is not as intense as he is perceived to be and can be “really, really funny.”

And she learned that early on. Two months after she started, McCain was set to appear on CBS’s “The Early Show.” Shuffield said she told her boss she would bring him the morning newspapers and a cup of coffee. But he had one other request: Make sure they have bananas.

So Shuffield called the show’s producer to make sure they would have bananas. But the next morning, there were no bananas in the studio. Shuffield was horrified. They frantically dispatched an intern to find some bananas — fast. The intern returned with a bunch of unripe, green bananas for the senator.

“Apparently, my press secretary doesn’t know when I’m kidding,” McCain said. But he felt obliged to eat one of the bananas after all the effort.

“After that day, I take him a little less seriously,” Shuffield said. “He knows when to be serious, but he always has time for humor. He knows you can’t take yourself too seriously. You have to be a real person.”

There has been a lack of the McCain response to attacks on Palin's experience. Obama has less experience and all the articles, I see concerning the experience issue are about Palin and none for Obama. Who dropped that ball?edi